John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Lost: The poster

Eric Tan is a California artist who does incredible posters, and often just for his own purposes. (He works for Disney, though.) Above is a poster he did for Lost, the TV show; many of the items on his blog relate to movies. He doesn't post often, but much of what you'll see are gems.

After nearly a decade, I still get a chuckle from the pets.com sock puppet

Pets.com went big with an advertising campaign in early 2000, buying Super Bowl airtime as if to prove its business model (delivering pet supplies to the home) was sound. The company launched an IPO just before the dot-com bubble of the day burst; it was all over before 2000 was out. A subsequent book revealed that pets.com spent 20 times more on advertising than it earned in revenue that year. 

But the ads, concocted by heavyweights TBWA\Chiat\Day, did at least get people talking, and were pretty entertaining. Here's a refresher. 

Odd Job: Celebrity endorser

Odd Job remains one of the great villains in the James Bond canon ... but did you know the character lent his brute force and peculiar charm to cough suppressant commercials, too? Here's a gem from 1968.

Five-fact Friday

Back-to-school sales have reignited the advertising wars for computers. Apple has been continuing its "I'm a Mac" campaign, which is credited with rapidly increasing the Mac share of the market. Last year, Apple outspent Microsoft's TV advertising by 71 per cent; in the first half of this year, however, Microsoft has more than doubled Apple's spending on commercials, in an attempt to win back customers.

Ted Kennedy grew up in the shadow of older brothers who seemed far more destined than he to gain the public spotlight; he also grew up on the move, attending 10 different schools by the time he was 11 years of age. 

If the 2010 Ikea catalogue looks a little bit different, look closely at the flag on the front cover. For the first time in a half-century, the Swedish manufacturer of build-your-own furniture has stopped using a stylized and very familiar type of Futura as its font. Instead, it has customized Verdana, which font geeks like myself know was invented for use on the web. Why? Verdana can be adapted to other alphabets, and Ikea wanted a consistent look online and in print, all over the world.

Duncan Jones, who is earning acclaim for his new, 2001-inflected film Moon, was better known decades ago by another name: Zowie Bowie, one of a series of oddball names rock stars gave to their children. The son of David Bowie, he went by Zowie until he was 12, when he changed his first name to Joey, and later Joe. As an adult, he's been known as Duncan Jones - the surname matching David Bowie's original name, David Jones. 

Speaking of unusual names, there's evidence that having one raises the odds you'll wind up in trouble with the law. Check out a Freakonomics posting on that here. 

Five-fact Friday

Five not terribly important things that you may not have known yesterday. Here we go: 

Avon originally was founded to sell books, not cosmetics. Founder David McConnell used perfume only as an incentive to help sell books.

Easter will be celebrated on the same day in 2010 in both the western Christian churches and in the Eastern Orthodox church. Because the churches use different methods to calculate when Easter falls, coinciding dates happen only a few times every century. (Easter will be on April 4, by the way.)

Chindu Sreedharan, 36, a lecturer at the Media School in Bournemouth University, England, has undertaken an ambitious project with his Twitter account. Through @Epicretold, he is tweeting, in segments of up to 140 characters, the contents of the world's largest poem, the Mahabharata.

Genius of Love by Tom Tom Club - the side project founded by husband-and-wife Talking Heads Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth - features a famous and much-sampled bassline ... but Weymouth didn't actually play it. Round-the-clock recording (they could afford only three days of studio time) left Weymouth unable to close her hand at one point, forcing her to teach the basslines to a technician. You can play the video below.

Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino mogul, has a surname that fits the gambling business, and by no accident. His father, a compulsive gambler who owned bingo halls, changed the family's name from Weinberg to a new identity. That detail is included in a recent 60 Minutes profile; click below to watch it.

Watch CBS Videos Online

The post-censored tour of the Mad Men set

Given that AMC has been reluctant to release much of any kind of detail about what to expect on the third season of Mad Men, which debuts tonight, you'll appreciate the joke on this "tour" of the set, made for Funny or Die:

Mad Men Spoiler Report - watch more funny videos

Go Mad Men Yourself: Or, how I dropped myself into Sterling Cooper

Those who watch Mad Men know that Don Draper is a self-made man ... or, rather, a self-invented one. A new game from the makers of the show should help stir the coffee pot leading up to the third season.

With Mad Men Yourself, you create our own avatar. That's me in the middle; I chose to put myself right in Sterling Cooper's austere Madison Ave. office. You can stylize your own look, and it probably says something that I chose things (jacket with elbow patches, for one) that I actually wear. Being light of hair - volume, not colour - I took advantage of the era and got a hat. For accessories, I picked a cup of coffee (duh) and a briefcase. Again, they work well in either era. 

Apart from making a wallpaper-sized image, you can also export your avatar with the right sizes for Twitter, Facebook, etc. Have fun.

The best trailers of all time

Movie trailers: they exist for one main purpose, and that's to get your rear end in a seat for a film that's about to come out. Crassly, they're just shilling for your dollars. But trailers, even ones for bad movies, are often entertaining ... and sometimes they're just spectacular.

I wasn't surprised to see the trailer for Alien, which I remember for its creepiness three decades later, fare well in this IFC list of the greatest trailers. Looking back at it with fresh eyes, I was surprised what a break from the trailer template the Alien teaser was. You can have a look at yourself, plus a few others, through the link.

With almost all the premium market, Apple lets the laptop hunters have at it

I read an amazing statistic today, coming out of the news that Apple is reporting a handsome profit, while at the same time frankly admitting it has no interest in the budget-computer market. From TechCrunch:

You need look no further than numbers released today by NPD to understand Apple’s strategy. Its revenue share of the “premium” price market — that is, computers over $1,000 — is a staggering 91%. This means that 9 out of every 10 dollars that is spent on PCs in that price range, goes to Apple, as Betanews’ Joe Wilcox points out. That, for lack of a better word, is insane.

This spring, Windows went on the assault with the Laptop Hunters ads, which featured a series of cost-conscious consumers comparing the specs of notebooks on the market. While peering over my Macbook (I'll admit I have a bias here, although I also use a Dell desktop), I have to say I found theaggressiveness of the campaign a strength, as in this commercial:

But, at the end of the day, the Laptop Hunters campaign may be a bit of weak victory, as Apple's competitors between them are essentially now competing for the scraps, as it were.

Again: 91 per cent of the premium market - which is not that largely priced, given what you get.

What are five gold lions worth in Cannes?

Not much, as five-time advertising fest winner Boondoggle found out, in this funny clip: